Simulating interviews is an exercise worth repeating. Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.
Mackay’s Moral:
Survivor and America’s Next Top Model are
not reality. This is reality television. Your reality.
Quickie—Encore! Encore!
David Buck is a highly imaginative guy who is resourcefully addressing an emerging need of overwhelming importance: the career shift that will become commonplace for adults at midlife.
David earned his BA from St. Olaf College and went on to receive an MBA from the University of Chicago. His “first” professional life was spent in the real estate world—leasing shopping mall space and then working in development of mixed locations that combined retail and residential.
In his midforties, David started reckoning with an inescapable fact of life: It’s too short. “How can I leave a meaningful personal legacy?” he asked himself. David met Jan Hively, PhD, who founded the Vital Aging Network. She said to David, “You are no different from seventy-six million other baby boomers who are now looking for more meaningful work.” David took this as a challenge—how can people help each other to move toward meaning in life and work?
Together, David and Jan started developing in the Twin Cities a new social network called SHiFT, which continues to grow. SHiFT offers new member-inspired programs including forums, interest groups, SHiFT Circles, and a Time Bank for sharing skills. The organization is also working on a new project called Midternships: Internships @ Midlife™, where people can take their interests and transferable skills into an internship experience.
SHiFT recognizes the “new arc” of most people’s working lives—they get it. If you want some good ideas for your community or want to join in a grassroots community tailored to midlifers in transition, check out SHiFT (
www.shiftonline.org
).
Chapter 28
The Age of the Agile Exec
Tierney Remick is global market managing director for the executive search firm Korn/Ferry International. I first contacted Tierney when I wrote
We Got Fired! . . . And It’s the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us
in October 2004
.
She is a leading authority on executive search, especially at very senior management levels. Since she shared such astute advice before, she was a “must” encore performance for this book. Take heed, all you wannabe CEOs. The advice and observations Tierney offers about C-level job candidates relate to the traits companies are looking for in up-and-coming managers at all levels.
When we last spoke, “sixty percent of all CEOs ended up getting fired.” In the present recession, have CEOs and other C-suite execs fared better or worse than five years ago?
The absolute turnover has declined but we anticipate it will rise again in 2010. The boards of directors have now had an opportunity to look at how leaders manage through crisis since many of them were elevated into their positions during times of high growth. They will be focusing on whether the same CEOs can drive a business longer term. These crisis dynamics will also affect other members of a top management team. Top managers are being assessed for their decision making, focus, and prioritization.
Are there any new career strategies top managers are using these days to get their careers back on track?
Top managers have had to demonstrate a certain amount of what could be called executive agility. Managers have to be able to prove that they can manage highly competitive markets, turnaround situations, and restructurings as well as periods of high growth. This is what separates the fabulous leaders from the mainstream.
These leaders need to be intelligent people by definition. That includes financial intelligence, business intelligence, and emotional intelligence. And a sense of balance in these ingredients is required.
Has the downturn changed how successful managers manage?
The emotional intelligence element is going to be more important going forward. Are you aware of the impact you have on the people you are trying to lead? Are they willing to follow you? Do you know how to leverage people’s motivation? This includes knowing how to use inspiration as well as empathy.
Retention of talented employees will become one of the leading factors that distinguish a great leader. The next generation of the workforce is multicultural, very global, and highly mobile. These employees don’t believe a particular organization will be their ultimate career destination. As a leader, the challenge becomes retaining and engaging talented resources for as long as you can.
Individuals in restructured environments are dealing with much larger spans of control. This has made influence leadership critical, not motivating people through the direct use of authority.
Tolerance for ambiguity is increasingly important. How do you manage when you aren’t really sure there’s a light at the end of the tunnel? The media may say we’re coming out of the recession, but from what we see, there are still companies cutting back, and consumers have changed their spending habits, thus affecting the pace at which we may be coming out of this recession.
Is worldwide networking playing a greater role in senior managers finding jobs?
Internet networks are not necessarily more important in placement. There are a number of networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn is a business network that allows people to access folks in companies in a pretty efficient way, if, for example, you want to submit a résumé. While Facebook is a social network, many small companies use it because of its broad connectivity.
Many of these networks are being used by the more junior level of the population. Add in phenomena like Twitter and blogs, and the Web has created a lot more connectivity. I’m not sure these networking links get you placed any faster, but they do connect you to a broader audience. As one illustration, you can reconnect to college classmates faster and restart dialogues.
An important note: These networks may offer connectivity. However, while you’re using these networks, so are a million other people. A year or two ago, one or two names a day may have surfaced to me through the Internet. Today, I receive dozens of names that way each day. So network fatigue is setting in.
Has the Internet made it easier for recruiters to screen candidates?
For an executive recruiter, it’s both harder and easier to screen a candidate. In the search world, information gathering—finding organization charts and where people are on them—has been commoditized. lt’s now public domain information. But it doesn’t mean you can necessarily screen the candidates better—you just have more information about them and what they have done.
So, the successful recruiter has to offer a lot more than what can be easily learned on the Internet? That’s something for a candidate to keep in mind. An excellent executive recruiter has to come up with talent that is both uniquely skilled and well qualified. What kind of traits do these new executive gems have?
The real value today’s recruiter offers is to identify and assess for the specific leadership traits, skills, and competencies that organizations need. This is the kind of assessment you can’t get off a Web database. At Korn/Ferry, we have moved toward the idea of the value proposition offered by a candidate—an idea which comes from the world of marketing. We still do traditional searches but we start by looking at organizations and ask what their business strategy is and what they are trying to accomplish. It’s not just I want a VP or president. How do you get the right quarterback to lead the current team against the relevant business strategy?
Do these top talents accept the inevitable turnover of people? Do they regard human beings as interchangeable, easily replaced parts?
The CEOs who really “get it” view human talent as an investment. Those who don’t view it as a cost. That attitude will be the distinguishing characteristic of an executive winner today. It comes back to the idea of whoever can retain the best talent the longest is going to win on the all-important human capital investment measure.
It’s widely known that English proficiency has increasing importance for managers abroad who are not native-born English speakers. Is it also of growing importance for American-born managers to have a command of at least one other language than English?
For U.S. companies, English is critical, as it is for European-based multinationals where English is the common language. Increasingly, in a global business environment, you want your English speakers to have another language as well. If you look across the landscape of CEOs in large global 500 companies, English may be the principal language, but there’s an important multicultural sensitivity that comes from having additional language fluencies.
You once told me that getting fired should be a “learning experience.” What new kinds of lessons are fired executives learning today—experiences that weren’t that common five years ago?
It’s still important for people to regard firing as a learning experience. An awful lot of people are recognizing they aren’t alone. The economic downturn has eliminated whole layers of management, not just individual jobs or poor performers. Much rests on how individuals explain their departure and how they identify and articulate their opportunities going forward.
Have you seen cases of senior managers trying to squeeze into jobs with a smaller income, a diminished title, or limited advancement possibilities? If a manager decides to pursue this course, do you have any tips on how to do this successfully?
This has been one consequence of the massive restructurings of the past five years. For some managers, a smaller scale job has been an inescapable reality, though not necessarily a negative one. A manager may be tied to a certain locale or a particular industry that has undergone massive consolidation. Also, some people were actually in stretch positions before the recession. For whatever reason, the job didn’t work out, and they’ve been willing to go back and leverage their core strengths.
You might see a president or group executive (not a CEO) move back into a divisional or functional role. People have made conscious choices, such as joining a smaller company with better growth potential. There are a number of smaller companies out there that are able to invest and expand at a faster pace. They are also less political and less hierarchical, and that appeals to certain managers. As a recruiter, I don’t necessarily see accepting a smaller responsibility or moving to a smaller company as a negative. I want to understand the why, the rationale behind it. How did a person contribute? Whether a person’s title changes is a less important issue.
How about computer and techno-literacy levels? I would assume these expectations have grown even for the most senior managers, e.g., are they all armed with notebooks and BlackBerrys?
You have to at least be aware of the technology. You need to understand what technology your employees use, how they communicate with each other, and how decisions are being made electronically. It may not affect you personally in the way you lead your daily life. But you have to have enough familiarity to be able to determine when technology is truly an advantage for your business.
Tierney, are you saying that it isn’t automatically to a manager’s or a candidate’s advantage to say he or she is all for always being at the cutting edge of technology in the way a business does things?
E-mail allows for rapid communication, but it doesn’t allow for actual dialogue. It can reduce interaction. You don’t get into conversations with others. Technology interactions can sometimes create more conflict and chaos than more genuine personal communication, achieved by picking up a phone or walking down the hall or down the stairs. E-mail may be efficient, but it isn’t necessarily the right way to solve the problem.
Emotional intelligence is a factor in deciding if an executive knows when to use face-to-face contact and when to rely on electronic communications. A really successful top manager is always asking such questions as: What’s the best way to lead the environment and to lead people? How do we tailor the communications so that we are actually creating a culture?
When we last talked, you stressed an incoming exec should have a clear agreement as to what he or she is expected to achieve. Has the economic turbulence of the last two years created new challenges in this regard?
Goal setting is important, but I would look at it from a slightly different angle. There has to be what we call great alignment. When you walk into a new role in a new company or in your own company, are you and the prospective manager in agreement about the nuances of what needs to be done?
On a personal level, executives who are looking for jobs need to understand what they choose to do to recalibrate their careers. As you evolve, you learn what environments you work best in to be successful.
With the trend toward continual re-engineering, is there a benefit for senior managers to develop multiple specialties? What core skills are companies looking for in top managers these days?
There are certain areas of specialization—especially in science and technology—that are truly unique and provide great opportunity. It goes back to the agility observation earlier. Specialization in an executive is fine if it truly allows this person to create added value for a particular organization.
The classic generalist has a downside of being a jack-of-all-trades. Great CEOs need to be very, very good in a couple of areas and surround themselves with people in other areas who are stronger than they are. The functional areas they should excel in will vary by situation, but several traits are mandatory: